According to an announcement in Wednesday’s Nanjing
Daily, beginning on May 15, people using shared-bikes and found to be
violating local traffic regulations must produce identification, accept the
resulting fines, and will have their rule-breaking counted as part of Nanjing’s
social
credit system.

The story in Nanjing
Daily notes that a number of riders refuse to hand over their name and
identification cards [身份证], daring
traffic officers to fine them and refusing to comply with the new rules. This
is frequently the behavior of riders here anyway, especially those who aren’t
actual Nanjing residents as they see little reason to abide by rules made by a city
which isn’t eager to grant them benefits anyway.In these cases, without a personally- owned bicycle
to seize or impound, some users believe that pedaling through a red light,
riding in a non-bicycle lane, or causing an accident is not a reason to take
responsibility but to try to escape it.

The story notes that, in one instance, traffic officers had
to pull a violator into a local police station to get him to provide his
identification and thus be included in the new system. In another case, an
offender dropped the shared bike and ran into a nearby park, but was caught. Another
incident saw a wrongdoer simply lock his shared bike and try to stroll away.

Traffic officers have said that the failure to accept fines
will result in offenders listed on a separate shared-bike list, whereupon they’ll
be barred from using these bikes in the future, or at least pay a far higher hourly
usage rate.

It’s not clear whether all of the share-bike companies here
are coordinating their operations with the Nanjing government, or if city
authorities are compiling their own data for incorporation into their specific
social credit records. Just getting the local bureaucracy aligned has been challenging. And what sometimes starts off as a policy ends up being just an experiment that gets crossed off when resistance appears.

Like so many matters here in Local China, there’s still a lot of
grey.